John Hussman: Investors Getting Fed Up With Fed’s Tactics

Economist and fund manager John Hussman says investors are fed up with the Federal Reserve's quantative easing moves.

"Frankly, I doubt that investors will find the third time to be a charm in the event of another round of QE," Hussman writes in a note to investors.

"This is why any willingness to accept risk (is) far more tied to our longstanding measures of market action and other testable factors than to some novel 'Bernanke faith factor' that we have no way of testing historically in any kind of rigorous manner."

Massive monetary interventions have not done much for the economy, but have proved capable of provoking speculation for several months at a time, Hussman notes.

“There may be latitude to take a more constructive stance between the point that any new monetary intervention produces an improvement in our measures of market internals, and the point where we re-establish an overvalued, overbought, overbullish syndrome,” says Hussman. “Without a material improvement in valuations or market action here, we remain defensive.”

“In the meantime, however, a bad week is unlikely to change our assessment unless that bad week includes a market crash.”

Hussman continues to view the U.S. economy as most probably entering a recession that will ultimately be marked as beginning in May or June of 2012.

The U.K. Telegraph reports that the U.S. economy has slowed to stall speed, and a few lonely forecasters fear that America has already fallen back into recession, replicating the terrible double-dip of 1937.